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Saturday, February 28, 2009

United States of America35. According to the United States, the concept of “defamation of religions” is notsupported by international law and efforts to combat “defamation of religions” typically result in restrictions on the freedoms of thought, conscience, religion and expression. The United States asserted that from a legal perspective, the “defamation of religions” concept is deeply problematic since under existing human rights law, individuals — not religions, ideologies, or beliefs — are the holders ofhuman rights and are protected by the law. However, the concept of defamation ofreligions seeks to convey the idea that a religion itself can be a subject of protection under human rights law, thereby potentially undermining protection for individuals.36. The United States stated in addition that a defamatory statement (or othercommunication) is more than just an offensive one. It is also a statement that is false. Because one defence to a charge of defamation is that the statement is in fact true, the concept does not properly apply to that which cannot be verified as either true or false, such as statements of belief or opinion. Even offensive opinions and beliefs are not defamatory. It is also unclear how defamation could be defined considering that one individual’s sincere belief that his or her creed alone is thetruth inevitably conflicts with another’s sincerely held view of the truth.37. The United States further submitted that even if a defamation standard were tobe legally enforceable, and even if it could be enforced in an equitable manner, it would lead to numerous legal claims and counterclaims between majority and minority religious communities or dissenting members of a faith. Instead of fostering tolerance, such a standard would almost certainly lead to greater conflict and intolerance. What is considered to be a sacred statement by one may be viewed as sacrilegious to another, and could therefore be legally actionable as a“defamation of religion”.38. Regarding freedom of expression, the United States expressed the view thatgovernment should not prohibit or punish speech, even offensive or hateful speech, because of an underlying confidence that in a free society such hateful ideas will fail because of their own intrinsic lack of merit. However, freedom of expression that threatens the public good is not absolute, prohibitions are restricted to forms ofexpression that threaten the public good by, for example, inciting imminent violenceor other unlawful activity; expression is not restricted merely for being offensive.39. The United States agreed that more must be done to promote inter-religiousunderstanding and believes concrete action supporting tolerance and individual rights is the best way to combat abusive actions and hateful ideologies.

Transcript of Thought For the World’s thought for the dayAriane Sherine16th February 2009
It’s likely that I don’t know you. I don’t know how old you are, or where you’re from; what your beliefs are, or how you voted in the last election. I don’t know whether you’re female or male, whether you’ve ever been in love, and whether you prefer peas or beans.

What I do know is that you’re lucky. Not because you’re listening to this; but because, if you are, it’s likely to mean that you’re free, and that you’re safe. If you can read this page, it means that you’re literate and have received some education. And if you’re listening in the UK, you also have access to clean running water, enough food to eat, and free medical treatment should you need it.

If we have all these things, it’s hard for us to fully grasp that hundreds of millions of people living in the world right now do not, and are suffering because of it. It’s much easier to turn off the news than to hear things which make us feel helpless and sad, such as the fact that in Zimbabwe, thousands of people are currently dying from starvation, cholera and Aids, due to the failure and neglect of Robert Mugabe’s government.

Lately, many people in the UK have been despairing of our own government. They are worried about the economy, about job security, about ID cards being introduced and freedom of speech being curtailed. They are right to stand up and try to protect our freedoms, which should never, ever be taken for granted.

However, whatever reservations we may have about our government, the fact that we can speak out against them is a wonderful thing. Robert Mugabe and dozens of other regimes have imprisoned, tortured and killed those who spoke out against them. And while our current government didn’t win us these freedoms, and may not have been as determined in upholding them as many of us would have hoped, we are a very, very long way from losing our freedoms altogether, as so many people have.

In a world where our chances are largely predetermined by where we are born, you and I are lucky enough to live in a country with an average life expectancy of 79, while Zimbabwe’s is just 35 – the shortest in the world.

We are lucky to be able to concern ourselves with issues of liberty, and not have to think about how we are going to feed our children today, or how long we have left to live. We are lucky to be able to believe what we like, and say what we like, as millions of people cannot. We should never forget that.

Probably a ridiculous caveat

When Ariane Sherine's brilliant initiative for an "atheist bus" campaign was in its planning stages, I wrote to her to say that I was not happy about the word "probably" in the slogan "There is probably no God".
I would question the rationality of anyone who thought that there is probably no Father Christmas, or probably no fairies at the bottom of the garden, etcetera, and since such beliefs and beliefs in the gods of Olympus and Ararat and all other religions are on a par, there is no "probably" about it. To which Sherine replied that the advertisement would not be accepted by the bus companies unless it contained the word "probably".

According to Tim Bleakley, marketing director of CBS Outdoor, which handles advertising for the bus networks, "advertising guidelines" require the word "probably"; to say that there is no God, he said, "would be misleading … So as not to fall foul of the code, you have to acknowledge that there is a grey area".
It would be misleading, eh? Thus the metaphysical authority of advertisers. You have to take your hat off to this one. If one wished to cite a better example of insidiousness, pusillanimity, timidity and absurdity, you would be hard pressed. There is something delicious about the thought of a functionary in an advertising agency doing ontology by arbitrating on the question of which fictional characters need a grey area of uncertainty around discussion of their existence – Little Red Riding Hood? Rumpelstiltskin? Santa? Betty Boop? Saint Veronica (who allegedly started out as sweat on a cloth and became a person)? Aphrodite? Wotan? Batman?

And of course the inevitable has immediately happened. Theos, the religious "think" tank, clutching at straws, claims that the word "probably" might encourage some to take the slogan to mean the opposite of what it is intended to mean. Such is the way with theology.

But give a nanometer to the ever-hopeful faithful – hope being a virtue after all – and they will take ten thousand miles, bringing with them on the journey all the things for which religion is so notable, from fantasy through folly to febrility and fanaticism.

Well: let us for a moment take the advertising standards code seriously. Parity requires that in all the many advertisements promoting religious belief on the buses and underground trains, "allegedly" be inserted into claims and statements that imply the existence of supernatural agencies. Now that the gauntlet has been thrown down on "probably" for the atheist buses, let us demand that "allegedly" appear in all advertisements promoting the opposite view.

I shall be writing to Tim Bleakley (CBS Outdoor, Camden Wharf, 28 Jamestown Road, London NW1 7BY) and the Advertising Standards Authority on the subject today, and invite you all to do likewise.

How to spot a hidden religious agenda

AS A book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I'd share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science's clothing.

Red flag number one: the term "scientific materialism". "Materialism" is most often used in contrast to something else - something non-material, or supernatural.

Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinists", take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for "evolution" and "biologists", respectively.

When evolution is described as a "blind, random, undirected process", be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not.

When cells are described as "astonishingly complex molecular machines", it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a "machine" requires an "engineer".

If an author wishes for "academic freedom", it is usually ID code for "the acceptance of creationism".

If an author wishes for 'academic freedom', it is usually code for 'the acceptance of creationism'

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid - "There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self" (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) - to the silly - "Yer granny was an ape!" (creationist blogger Denyse O'Leary).

If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn't need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the "documentary" film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin's On the Origin of Species "articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for 'A Designer'", his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public's intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

Amanda Gefter is an editor for the Opinion section of New Scientist

From issue 2697 of New Scientist magazine, page 23. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

REPORT OF THE UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONERFOR HUMAN RIGHTS ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OFHUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL RESOLUTION 7/19 ENTITLED "COMBATING DEFAMATION OF RELIGIONS"*

The Council of Europe32. The Council of Europe submits that freedom of expression and freedom of religion are among the foundations of democratic societies and are instrumental for pluralism. The Council refers to article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and article 10, which protects freedom of expression. The Council notes that, in this connection, article 10 does not protect hate speech, speech that incites hatred or violence and discrimination against a specific group of individuals on ethnic, national, religious, sexual orientation or other grounds.

Regarding the freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs, the Council asserts that article 9 protects rights of individuals and cannot be construed as protecting a religion as such from verbal or visual attacks.

33. With respect to the scope of article 10 and its relationship to religion,

the Council cites a decision of the European Court of Human Rights, according to which "those who choose to exercise the freedom to manifest their religion, irrespective of whether they do so as members of a religious majority or a minority, cannot reasonably expect to be exempt from all criticism. They must tolerate and accept the denial by others of their religious beliefs and even the propagation by others of doctrines hostile to their faith."

The Council points out, however, that the European Court of Human Rights has accepted limitations to the freedom of expression under article 10 if such limitations are justified by a "pressing social need" and are designed to provide protection against offensive attacks on matters which are regarded as sacred by a religious group. 34. The Council also refers to recommendation 1805 of 2007 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which concerns religious insults and hate speech against persons on grounds of religion.

The recommendation further stipulates that blasphemy as an insult to a religion should not be deemed a criminal offence.

35. The Council also reports that the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, an independent human rights monitoring mechanism, strongly condemns incitement to violence or hatred and discrimination against individuals or groups on several grounds, including religion, and works to counter religious intolerance. In this connection, Commission general policy recommendation no. 5 "strongly regrets that Islam is sometimes portrayed inaccurately on the basis of hostile stereotyping, the effect of which is to make this religion seem a threat". Recommendation 5 rejects deterministic views of Islam and recommends against distorted interpretations of religious and cultural history in the curricula of schools and institutions of higher learning, in particular the portrayal of Islam as hostile and a menace. It calls on Member States to "direct particular attention towards removing unnecessary legal or administrative obstacles to both the construction of sufficient numbers of appropriate places of worship for the practice of Islam and to its funeral rites". Recommendation 5 also calls on Member States to take the necessary measures to ensure that the freedom to practice religion is fully guaranteed.

International Humanist and Ethical Union 46. The International Humanist and Ethical Union expressed concern over the impact of blasphemy legislation on freedom of expression and freedom of religion, including on those who do not practise the predominant religion in a Member State. In this connection, the Union recommends that the study requested by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 7/19 should include both an examination of existing blasphemy laws and an assessment of the implications for human rights of defamation of religion laws.

The Union also recommended that a resolution be tabled calling on States in which blasphemy constitutes a capital offence to remove the death sentence.

Additionally,

the Union suggested that United Nations bodies considering the question of defamation of religions adopt a similar position as the Council of Europe, where freedom of expression is given much greater weight.

Conclusions

67. Some countries have specific laws against the defamation of religion. Of the countries that reported on such laws, there does not appear to be a common understanding of what is considered defamation of religion.

The reported laws address somewhat different phenomena and apply various terms such as contempt, ridicule, outrage and disrespect to connote defamation.

The responses do not provide enough information for an analysis of how these terms are understood or applied. The relationship between these concepts to the international human rights framework related to freedom of religion is also not explicitly addressed.

Scientists talk about sub-atomic particles which are invisible to the eye. Do such particles really exist? Or are they simply convenient fictions that, for the moment at least, explain the observable phenomena? David Papineau discusses and defends scientific realism in this episode of Philosophy Bites.

"There is no God" proclaimed a Leeds student banner … "but Allah" added some prankster. It made me laugh, and the event might have remained merely funny if it weren't part of a nasty campaign of vandalism and abuse against atheist and secular student societies. The president of Leeds University Atheist Society complained to the Student Union after their banners and posters were repeatedly stolen or defaced and members received verbal abuse and threats, but received no help or support. They launched a Facebook free speech debate on "I'll mock Mohammed if I want to"; an admittedly provocative title but just the sort of thing students should be debating when some Muslims seem to think they have a right to rid the world of anything that offends them. The mocking Muhammad debate was met with death threats.

The Warwick Atheists were doing rather well. They won the "Best New Society" award and £100 prize money for "excelling in all categories" including charity and inter-faith work. They arranged an evening of student talks and put up posters to advertise it saying "The importance of Atheism", and adorned with a graphic of someone throwing a bunch of religious symbols (cross, star of David, yin-yang and more) into a dustbin. Underneath were the words "It's time to take out the trash".

For goodness sake – is there something wrong with this? Surely not. It expresses a worthwhile opinion – that atheism is important in challenging religious oppression – and it lists topics for talks that many students might like to attend, including "religious repression of sexuality" and "the maltreatment of women by religion". Of course devout believers might be offended at the image of their precious religious symbol being thrown in a dustbin – but tough. It's only a dustbin. The symbols are not burnt, or crushed by tanks, or even defaced, and there's no suggestion of harm to the people who believe in them.

So it is truly scary to learn that this mild advertisement for some lectures caused the stir it did. The Union revoked the Society's award and took away the £100. The poster was banned from the campus on the grounds that it was "in breach of its commitment to equal opportunities". After a fuss in local papers, and a poll which showed that more than three quarters of people opposed the ban, the award was reinstated – but without the £100.

If challenging religion, claiming that atheism is important, or wanting to throw out the trash of religious fundamentalism, is in breach of equal opportunities then either I don't understand the words "equal" and "opportunities" or this principle is being grossly abused.

All this leads me to wonder about the future for student atheists. Most of my life I have enjoyed what you might call laissez-faire atheism – just not believing in God, thinking that people who do are daft, and leaving them to it. It seemed that ignoring religion was much the best way of letting it fade quietly away.

Sadly I think the days of laissez-faire atheism are over, and young, thoughtful, student atheists are in a tricky position. Christianity and Islam seem ever more at odds with each other. Islamic groups claim to have the right not be offended. Some even demand to have their repulsively repressive and unfair Sharia laws respected here. So we need students who care about freedom of speech, freedom of thought, intellectual honesty, open inquiry, or sexual equality to speak up.

But what is going to happen when they get clobbered? Few unbelievers are natural extremists or looking for a fight, but now they are being forced, by events occurring all over the world, to stand up for their unbelief. And if the events at Warwick and Leeds are anything to go by they are going to suffer abuse, threats and even harm. Will they – should they – fight back, or should they turn the other cheek? It's one thing to be brave because you believe that one day God will send you to heaven, and rather different to suffer because you don't believe in any God.

And the last thing we need is another warring faction in the rotten war of ideas caused by religious differences.

Today sees the launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies . I wish them well. We need people who don't believe in God to show that you can be moral and good without religion, and to criticise the worse excesses of religious repression and dogma. I hope they won't suffer more abuse but if they do I trust that their natural moral principles, not derived from any God or from any ancient book, will help them behave better than their God-fearing persecutors.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

*Roy Brown is immediate past president of IHEU and main IHEU representative, United Nations, Geneva.

Thank you, Dr Vijayam, the Gora family and the Atheist Centre for hosting this 7th World Atheist Conference: “The March of Atheism”, a conference which itself marks an important step on that march. But the path of Atheism has never been easy. I would like this morning to examine some of the reasons why.

Over the past hundred years, science has revealed the unimaginable vastness of the Universe. We now know that our planet is just a tiny speck in that vast expanse of the Cosmos, barely visible from the outer reaches of the Solar System, let alone from stars and galaxies a trillion times further away.

We also know that far from being formed complete and perfect, the object of divine creation, we humans are simply one species (well OK, a particularly versatile species) but only one species among the many millions of others that have evolved here on Earth by the blind, unguided process of evolution through natural selection.

In the light of that knowledge the idea that we humans are the ultimate and privileged product of a purposeful, divine creation can be seen as the purest fantasy. So why do so many people still cling to such beliefs?

Since Atheism is such a liberating, logically tenable, rational philosophy, why is the march of Atheism such a long, hard slog along such a difficult and rocky path? I want to suggest that there are four major obstacles on the path. And the first of these is …

Religion Whether we like it or not, many people find religion attractive. Every religion claims to have a monopoly of truth and a monopoly of virtue. Who among us, other things being equal and provided the personal cost is not too high, would not like to be considered both virtuous and endowed with knowledge of the truth? We like the splendour, the ritual, the music, the repetition and the comfort that religion provides. But more than that, we love the certainty that religion offers in an uncertain world. Seeking answers to life’s great questions is an important part of what makes us human – and religion supplies the answers. Above all, with its promises of reincarnation or an afterlife surrounded by angels, religion offers an attractive alternative to the bleak prospect of our mortality.

How can we compete? One problem we have in confronting the certainties of religion is that the transcendental really does exist. Don’t look so surprised! It exists in our imagination. Gods, fairies, unicorns, ghosts and angels may all be creatures of the imagination but we have no certain logical way of demonstrating that they are purely imaginary. The best we can do is to point out in the light of our newfound scientific knowledge the vanishingly small probability that the supernatural world really exists. But while we offer only probability, religion offers absolute certainty.

Now perhaps it would not matter that religion teaches nonsense (or perhaps, being charitable, I should say “that religion makes unsubstantiated claims”) if that nonsense was totally benign.

But scratch any religion and you find violence lurking just beneath the surface. Every successful religion has evolved memes for self-protection. Whether it is the promise of eternal damnation or the death penalty for apostasy, the promotion of faith over reason, or the demonization of science, these memes have helped sustain the hegemony of religion.

Finally, religion offers many people a purpose in life. Not everyone is capable of accepting the truth that we are all here by chance and that evolution gave us no other purpose in life than to reproduce. For Atheists, Rationalists and Humanists the purpose of life will always be what we choose to make it.

The second stumbling block in our path is …Human nature None of us is entirely rational. However much we may wish we were guided purely by reason, we are all emotional creatures. We have evolved to be that way. We trust our emotions more than we trust reason. I know I do. And I know that I have frequently been guilty of using my reason to justify my gut reaction to events. We would like the promises of religion to be true, so we have a desire to believe, an emotional commitment to belief. We use our reason to argue that, well, how can I be sure the claims of eternal life or reincarnation are unfounded? Or that if I die in battle in the cause of Allah I won’t be comforted by 72 virgins?

Secondly, it is in our nature to conform. We are social, tribal animals. Each of us grew up as part of a culture with shared beliefs and values. For most people religion is an essential part of that culture, the glue that binds society together. As children we are taught the beliefs of our parents and our community as fact. If we are part of a community that sees its particular religion as the sole repository of virtue, then to attack or challenge that religion is to attack the very foundations of society. Why would I risk alienation from my community by calling these claims into question? Surely it is better to play along; to pretend to believe even if I am not entirely sure.

The third rock in our path is …Politics Two thousand years ago the Roman statesman Seneca the Younger said that the common people find all religions to be equally true, the philosophers find them all equally false, and the rulers find them all equally useful. Not much has changed in 2000 years. Every tin pot dictator, every demagogue, every unworthy ruler attempting to reinforce his power has claimed the support of religion. And the priests have been all too willing to provide that support. What better means could the priests find to preserve their own power than by supporting the rulers and to have their active support in return?

The fact that our political masters find religion useful is, I would suggest, the primary reason for the continuing dominant position of religion in society. We can see this happening today not only in dreadful authoritarian states like Iran and Saudi Arabia but in the world’s great democracies such as India, the United States and even France. Just a few years ago the President of the United States said that, in his view, unbelievers should not be considered citizens.

But it is not only the priests and the rulers that find religion useful. Some philosophers do so too. I have here an article by Matthew Parris, one of the best-known atheist commentators in England, from The Times of just ten days ago. It is called: “As an atheist I truly believe Africa needs God”. He notes that in Africa people who convert to Christianity generally behave better than those who retain their earlier animist beliefs. What he means of course is not that Africa needs God but that Africans need to believe in God. Here then is a philosopher who has replaced the pursuit of truth by the pursuit of expediency. If it makes people better – even if it is based on a lie – let’s go for it. With friends like these, religion is getting an easy ride. It is just one more manifestation of the often heard, paternalistic line that “Of course I don’t believe all that nonsense myself but it helps keep the people in line.”

The fourth rock that I see impeding the March of Atheism is… Atheism itself

Atheism, particularly in the West, has a bad name. In the public mind it is linked to the idea of State Atheism, Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse Tung.

Secondly, and in contrast to religion, Atheism per se is not a complete philosophy of life. Disbelief in the transcendental may well be the only respectable, philosophically sound position for an educated, thinking person to take, but the mere absence of a belief does not constitute a philosophy of life. It is quite possible for a rational Atheist to be completely self-obsessed and to care nothing for others.

Indeed, I suspect that some of us know of such people.

The Atheist Centre of course offers more than mere Atheism, it offers Gora’s Positive Atheism, not just Rationalism. It offers Rationalism in the service of compassion: what we call Humanism. Atheism then is a necessary step on the road to enlightenment and to Humanism, but it is not enough. It is where our Atheism leads that is important.

We must recognise that the March of Atheism is not an end in itself but a step on the way to understanding ourselves, the world, and our place within it; a step on the road to caring for others as we care for ourselves; and a step towards the ultimate goal of Humanism and enlightenment.

So how can we shift the rocks from our path? Here are some ideas and some arguments we can use.

1. I would point out the importance of uncertainty, of doubt, as the mainspring of human progress. Humanity has only ever made progress when an individual has stood out from the crowd and cast doubt on the received wisdom of the day.

Any society that prohibits doubt and dissent is probably doomed to stagnation and failure. I would cite Imperial China, Soviet-style Communism, and fundamentalist Islamic states such as Iran as prime examples. Iran and Saudi Arabia may not have failed – yet – but their ultimate failure is surely inevitable.

2. While Rationalism and Atheism are, well, rational, concern for others, the second leg on which Humanism stands, is difficult to explain by reason alone. Yet altruism, or empathy, is an important part of what makes us human. We have evolved to be compassionate. The apparent irrationality of altruism can be explained by evolution. We have evolved to show kindness to strangers. Even though we feel that altruism may be driven by emotion rather than reason, it would not have evolved if it did not confer on us some evolutionary advantage.

3. Humanism offers a complete alternative to religion. Humanists the world over have shown that you don’t need God to be good. And remember that men never do evil as willingly as when they do it in the name of religion.

4. We must do all we can to promote scientific education and critical thinking. Wishful thinking is no substitute for knowing how the world really is. Applying reason to our problems might just help us find a solution; praying never will. Prayer is simply a waste of time and effort; a poor substitute for action.

5. We must challenge the truth claims of religion. Where is the evidence? The believer will reply that we must have faith. But as Mark Twain said: “faith is believing what you know ain’t so”. If religion offered any credible evidence to support its claims, believers would not need faith. The only evidence religions offer for their truth claims is reference to their ancient holy books (ignoring some of the more recent holy books concocted by failed science fiction writers). But the pre-scientific scribblings of some desert tribe are surely no competition for the evidence of science and the application of reason.

6. We must challenge the claims of religion to a monopoly of virtue. First, many of the virtues they claim as uniquely their own were known to the ancients long before their favourite prophet revealed them to the world. They evolved with human civilisation. Secondly, what some religions call virtues, others might call criminal barbarity. We need look no further than the stoning of women for adultery, at one time sanctioned by both Christianity and Judaism, to show that religions too evolve. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that stoning and slavery, no longer accepted by Christianity and Judaism, will also disappear from the Islamic world. Can we even hope that India will one day see the caste system as a primitive and barbaric throwback to a less civilised era?

7. Religion does not lead to a better world. It has always and everywhere stood in the way of progress. Many of the precepts that religion teaches us about how we should live do have value both for ourselves and for society as a whole. But all of these principles can be arrived at without reference to the supernatural – and in fact were so in the course of human history.

8. The linking of morality to religion has created a major problem for society. Teaching children that they must be moral because God wants them to, and that he will punish them if they behave badly, denies the truth that good behaviour is a worthy end in its own right. Loss of belief then leads to loss of good behaviour in society.

I could go on but I will stop there and conclude. Yes, Atheism is on the march, but we must be clear about where it is leading. Without Humanism as the goal the march of Atheism will fail to bear full fruit. We are fortunate that writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have finally broken the taboo and created a climate in which it is once again respectable to speak about Atheism.

Richard Dawkins in particular, with his clarity of thought and writing, has given us irrefutable arguments for Atheism. I would like this conference to agree to pass a resolution of thanks to Richard Dawkins. Here is a man in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, Robert Green Ingersoll, M N Roy and Gora who, through his integrity and devotion to truth can truly be said to have changed the world for the better. Thank you.

Address to the 7th World Atheist Conference, Vijayawada, India, 6 January 2009

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

Mapping of CSH Statement of Principles to HASSNERS Statements (February 2009 by crabsallover).

Humanist - live a good life without religious or superstitious beliefs. More

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

Atheist - de facto atheist antitheists who affirm, in all probability, that gods do not exist. More

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

Scientific - science & the scientific method is the best way (eg evolution v creationism) to understand the world. More

We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

Naturalist - the natural world (the Universe) is all that exists; nothing supernatural or mystical. All events may be explained by natural causes. More

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

Ethical - ethical standards are worked out by every individual, not by gods. More

We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

According to BHA Newsline 23 February 2009, last week saw the launch of the AHS - a new federation of atheist, Humanist and secular student societies, affiliated to the British Humanist Association. The BHA was instrumental in initiating the AHS and worked with them to organise the launch, as well as on new resources to help with the setting up of even more student groups. Andrew Copson, BHA Director of Education and Public Affairs, said, 'Our universities and colleges are places where the rational humanist tradition is at its best: places of free inquiry, of personal development and of community. The launch of the AHS today makes that explicit and we are delighted that we can support such a new group.' You can see photos from the launch on BHA site.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why.

It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking.

"There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.

Mind and matter

Bloom says the two systems are autonomous, leaving us with two viewpoints on the world: one that deals with minds, and one that handles physical aspects of the world. He calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct "common-sense dualism". The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate - and separable - package. "We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic," Bloom says. "These are universal views."

There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners. As Barrett points out, this is an evolutionarily useful skill. Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. "Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability," he says.

Useful as it is, common-sense dualism also appears to prime the brain for supernatural concepts such as life after death. In 2004, Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast, UK, put on a puppet show for a group of pre-school children. During the show, an alligator ate a mouse. The researchers then asked the children questions about the physical existence of the mouse, such as: "Can the mouse still be sick? Does it need to eat or drink?" The children said no. But when asked more "spiritual" questions, such as "does the mouse think and know things?", the children answered yes.

Default to god

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none. "You see bushes rustle, you assume there's somebody or something there," Bloom says. This over-attribution of cause and effect probably evolved for survival. If there are predators around, it is no good spotting them 9 times out of 10. Running away when you don't have to is a small price to pay for avoiding danger when the threat is real.

Again, experiments on young children reveal this default state of the mind. Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen.

In similar experiments, Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people.

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

Our predisposition to believe in a supernatural world stays with us as we get older. Kelemen has found that adults are just as inclined to see design and intention where there is none. Put under pressure to explain natural phenomena, adults often fall back on teleological arguments, such as "trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "the sun is hot because warmth nurtures life". Though she doesn't yet have evidence that this tendency is linked to belief in god, Kelemen does have results showing that most adults tacitly believe they have souls.

Boyer is keen to point out that religious adults are not childish or weak-minded. Studies reveal that religious adults have very different mindsets from children, concentrating more on the moral dimensions of their faith and less on its supernatural attributes.

Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact of the wiring in our brain, says Bloom. "All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away." Petrovich adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. "They don't completely exorcise the ghost of god - they just muzzle it," Bering says.

The fact that trauma is so often responsible for these slips gives a clue as to why adults find it so difficult to jettison their innate belief in gods, Atran says. The problem is something he calls "the tragedy of cognition". Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong - including their own death, which is hard to deal with. "You've got to figure out a solution, otherwise you're overwhelmed," Atran says. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card, we take it.

That view is backed up by an experiment published late last year (Science, vol 322, p 115). Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation.The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says. What's going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.

So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.

It does, however, suggests that god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell. Religious belief is the "path of least resistance", says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.

These findings also challenge the idea that religion is an adaptation. "Yes, religion helps create large societies - and once you have large societies you can outcompete groups that don't," Atran says. "But it arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds.I don't think there's an adaptation for religion any more than there's an adaptation to make airplanes."

Supporters of the adaptation hypothesis, however, say that the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. As David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York state points out, elements of religious belief could have arisen as a by-product of brain evolution, but religion per se was selected for because it promotes group survival.

"Most adaptations are built from previous structures," he says. "Boyer's basic thesis and my basic thesis could both be correct."Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford - the researcher most strongly identified with the religion-as-adaptation argument - also has no problem with the idea that religion co-opts brain circuits that evolved for something else.

Richard Dawkins, too, sees the two camps as compatible. "Why shouldn't both be correct?" he says. "I actually think they are."

Ultimately, discovering the true origins of something as complex as religion will be difficult. There is one experiment, however, that could go a long way to proving whether Boyer, Bloom and the rest are onto something profound. Ethical issues mean it won't be done any time soon, but that hasn't stopped people speculating about the outcome.

It goes something like this. Left to their own devices, children create their own "creole" languages using hard-wired linguistic brain circuits. A similar experiment would provide our best test of the innate religious inclinations of humans. Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs? "I think the answer is yes," says Bloom.

God of the gullibile

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that religion is propagated through indoctrination, especially of children. Evolution predisposes children to swallow whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them, he argues, as trusting obedience is valuable for survival. This also leads to what Dawkins calls "slavish gullibility" in the face of religious claims.

If children have an innate belief in god, however, where does that leave the indoctrination hypothesis? "I am thoroughly happy with believing that children are predisposed to believe in invisible gods - I always was," says Dawkins. "But I also find the indoctrination hypothesis plausible. The two influences could, and I suspect do, reinforce one another." He suggests that evolved gullibility converts a child's general predisposition to believe in god into a specific belief in the god (or gods) their parents worship.

Michael Brooks is a writer based in Lewes, UK. He is the author of 13 Things That Don't Make Sense (Profile)

How evolution found God

RELIGIOUS belief is a conundrum. In our everyday lives, most of us make at least some effort to check the truth of claims for ourselves. Yet when it comes to religion, studies show that we are most persuaded by stories that contradict the known laws of physics. Tales of supernatural beings walking on water, raising the dead, passing through walls, foretelling the future, and the like, are universally popular. At the same time, however, we expect our gods to have normal human feelings and emotions. We like our miracles, and those who perform them, to have just the right mix of otherworldliness and everyday characteristics.

Why are we humans so willing to commit to religious beliefs we can never hope to verify?

You might well think that question falls outside the realm of scientific investigation. Evolutionary biologists in particular have taken their cue from their own guru, Charles Darwin, and studiously ignored the whole issue of god. But now that is starting to change. It's not clear what has triggered the interest, but a significant factor has probably been the growing recognition that religion is a real evolutionary puzzle. On the face of it, religious behaviour seems to be at odds with everything we biologists hold dear. The reductionist view sees us as merely vehicles for our selfish genes - yet religions embrace charity to strangers, submission to the will of the community, and even martyrdom. No self-respecting baboon or chimpanzee would ever willingly kowtow to the good, the bad or the ugly in quite the same way humans do.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for evolutionary biologists has been recognising that religion might have a functional advantage. If a biological trait has evolved, we want to know what use it is - and by that we mean how does possessing this trait make an individual better adapted to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation. That's not always apparent where religion is concerned. But in recent years,

evolutionary biologists including myself have come to realise that there are some important aspects of religion that do seem to have benefits.

Being part of a group massively ratchets up your endorphin rush

Evolutionary biologists have identified at least four ways in which religion might be of benefit in terms of evolutionary fitness.

The first is to give sufficient explanatory structure to the universe to allow us to control it, perhaps through the intercession of a spirit world.

The second is to make us feel better about life, or at least resigned to its worst vagaries - Marx's "opium of the masses".

A third is that religions provide and enforce some kind of moral code, so keeping social order.

Finally, religious belief might bring a sense of communality, of group membership.

The first is to give sufficient explanatory structure to the universe to allow us to control it, perhaps through the intercession of a spirit world.

The first idea - religion as cosmic controller - seems highly plausible, given that many religious practices aim to cure diseases and foretell or influence the future. It was the view favoured by Freud. However, since religious belief does not necessarily enable us to control the vagaries of the world, I find it difficult to see this as the evolutionary force behind the origin of religion. Rather, I suspect that this benefit came about as a by-product once our ancestors had evolved religion for one of the other reasons - and thus had a big enough brain to figure out some metaphysical theories about the world.

The second is to make us feel better about life, or at least resigned to its worst vagaries - Marx's "opium of the masses".

The second hypothesis, Marx's opium, seems more promising. In fact, it turns out that religion really does make you feel better. Recent sociological studies have shown that compared with non-religious people, the actively religious are happier, live longer, suffer fewer physical and mental illnesses, and recover faster from medical interventions such as surgery. All this is bad news for those of us who are not religious, but it might at least prompt us to ask why and how religion imparts its feel-good factor. And we'll come back to that later.

3) A third is that religions provide and enforce some kind of moral code, so keeping social order.

4) Finally, religious belief might bring a sense of communality, of group membership.

The other two options are concerned with individuals benefiting from being part of a cohesive, supportive group. Moral codes play an obvious role in ensuring that group members keep singing from the same hymn sheet. Nevertheless, the sort of formalised moral codes preached and enforced by today's major religions are unlikely to provide much insight into the beginnings of religious belief. They are associated with the rise of the so-called world religions with their bureaucratic structures and the alliance between church and state. Most people who study religion believe that the earliest religions were more like the shamanic religions found in traditional small-scale societies. These are quite individualistic, even though some individuals - shamans, medicine men, wise women, and the like - are acknowledged as having special powers. Shamanic religions are religions of emotion not intellect, with the emphasis on religious experience rather than the imposition of codes of behaviour.

Social glue

In my view, the real benefits of religion in terms of evolutionary fitness have to do with the fourth hypothesis. The idea that religion acts as a kind of glue that holds society together was also favoured by Emil Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Now, though, we know more about how this works.

Religions bond societies because they exploit a whole suite of rituals that are extremely good at triggering the release of endorphins, natural opioids in the brain. Endorphins are part of the body's pain-control system, a slow-acting mechanism that takes over when the various neurological systems of pain control have peaked in their effectiveness. Endorphins come into their own when pain is modest but persistent - then they flood the brain, creating a mild "high". Perhaps that is why religious people often seem so happy. What's more, and here's the rub, endorphins also "tune up" the immune system, which probably explains why religious people are healthier.

This may be why religious rituals so often involve activities that are physically stressful - singing, dancing, repetitive swaying or bobbing movements, awkward postures like kneeling or the lotus position, counting beads, and occasionally even seriously painful activities like self-flagellation. Of course, religion is not the only way to get an endorphin fix. You will also get a high from jogging, swimming or pumping iron, but religion offers something more. When you experience an endorphin rush as part of a group, its effect is ratcheted up massively. In particular, it makes you feel very positive towards other group members. It creates a sense of brotherhood and communality.

Monkey morality

While this may explain the immediate advantage of religion, it raises the question of why we need it at all. The answer, I believe, goes back to the very nature of primate sociality. Monkeys and apes live in an intensely social world in which group-level benefits are achieved through cooperation. In effect, primate social groups, unlike those of almost all other species, are built on implicit social contracts: individuals are obliged to accept that they must forgo some of their more immediate personal demands in the interests of keeping the group together. If you push your personal demands too far, you end up driving everyone else away, and so lose the benefits that the group provides in terms of protection against predators, defence of resources and so on.

The real problem that all such social contract systems face is the "free-rider" - someone who takes the benefits of sociality without paying their share of the costs. Primates need a powerful mechanism to counteract the natural tendency for individuals to free-ride whenever they are given the chance. Monkeys and apes do this through social grooming, an activity that creates trust, which in turn provides the basis for coalitions. Exactly how this works is not yet clear, but what we do know is that endorphins are a vital ingredient. Grooming and being groomed lead to the release of endorphins. Endorphins make individuals feel good, providing an immediate motivation to engage in the activity that bonds the group.

The trouble with grooming as far as our own species is concerned, however, is that it is a one-on-one activity, so it's very time-consuming. At some stage in our evolutionary past, our ancestors began living in groups that were too large for social grooming to provide effective glue. Such large groups would also have been especially prone to exploitation by free-riders. They needed to come up with an alternative method of group bonding. In the past, I have suggested that gossip would have played a role, allowing individuals to perform an activity that provides a similar function to grooming but in small groups rather than one to one. But religion would have taken this a step further, allowing larger groups to bond.

It is important to emphasise, however, that if this account of the origins of religion is right, then it began very much as a small scale phenomenon. Perhaps early religious practices included something like the trance dances found in shamanistic-type religions today. The !Kung San of southern Africa, for example, seek to heal rifts in personal relationships within the community by using music and repetitive dance movement to trigger trances. It is easy to see how this sort of activity could have been beneficial to our ancestors, uniting the group, discouraging free-riders, and so increasing the chances that individuals would survive and reproduce.

However, there is one last issue. Religion is not just about ritual, it also has an important cognitive component - its theology. The endorphin-based group-bonding effects of the rituals only work if everyone does them together. Which is where the theology comes in - it provides the stick and the carrot that make us all turn up regularly. But to create a theology our ancestors needed to evolve cognitive abilities that far exceed those found in any other animal species (see "The origins of religion"). It is these psychological mechanisms that have been exploited down the ages by political elites in various attempts to subjugate the rest of the community. Marx, it seems, was right after all.

The origins of religion

Our ancestors did not always have religion, yet many religious practices seem to have very ancient origins. So when did religion first evolve? Archaeologists have long been fascinated by this question. One indication is burial. Some experts believe this began as far back as 200,000 years ago with the Neanderthals, but the motivation for such cacheing of bodies is ambiguous. So most archaeologists more cautiously define the appearance of religion by looking for evidence of grave goods in burials, since these at least unequivocally imply belief in an afterlife. Deliberate burials of this kind do not occur much before 25,000 years ago. Such burials imply a sophisticated theology, so we can safely assume that these were preceded by a long phase of less sophisticated religious belief. But without evidence on the ground, can we see any further back than this?

I have suggested that there is another way to get an unexpected insight into the question. It comes from asking what kind of mind is required to hold religious beliefs. Take the statement: "I believe that god wants..." To grasp this an individual needs theory of mind - the capacity to understand that another individual (in this case, god) has a mind of his own. Philosophers call this "second-order intentionality" because such statements contain two notions of intent: I believe and god wants. But we need more than this to build a religion.

Third-order intentionality allows me to state: I believe that god wants us to act with righteous intent. At this level, I have personal religion. But if I am to persuade you to join me in this view, I have to add your mind state: I want you to believe that god wants us to act righteously. That's fourth-order intentionality, and it gives us social religion. Even now, you can accept the truth of my statement and still it commits you to nothing. But add a fifth level (I want you to know that we both believe that god wants us to act righteously) and now, if you accept the validity of my claim, you also implicitly accept that you believe it too. Now we have what I call communal religion: together, we can invoke a spiritual force that obliges, perhaps even forces, us to behave in a certain way.

So, communal religion requires fifth-order intentionality, and this also happens to be the limit of most people's capacity as indicated by research done by myself and my colleagues. I think this is no coincidence. The majority of human activities can probably be dealt with using second or third-order intentionality. The two extra layers beyond this undoubtedly come at some considerable neural expense. Since evolution is frugal, there must be some good reason why we have them. The only plausible answer, so far as I can see, is religion. And that's where this line of reasoning can throw light on the origins of religious belief.

As far as we know, all other animals are locked into first-order intentionality, with the exception of great apes who are just about able to cope with second order. If you look at the brains of humans and other animals you find that the level of intentionality they can achieve scales linearly with the volume of grey matter in their frontal lobes (a particularly important part of the brain's processing units). This can be used to work out the level of intentionality our extinct ancestors were capable of - provided you have a fossil skull from which you can measure the overall volume of the brain.

Plotting these values onto a graph, the evidence suggests that as early as 2 million years ago, Homo erectus would have aspired to third-order intentionality, perhaps allowing them to have personal beliefs about the world. Fourth-order intentionality - equating to social religion - appeared with archaic humans around 500,000 years ago. And fifth order didn't appear much before the evolution of anatomically modern humans around 200,000 years ago - early enough to ensure that all living humans share this trait, but late enough to suggest that it was probably a unique adaptation.

In a separate strand of research, my colleagues and I have also found a relationship between the size of the brain's neocortex and social group size in primates. Interestingly, this "social brain hypothesis" predicts that around the time our ancestors evolved the capacity for fifth-order intentionality their community sizes would have exceeded about 120 individuals. Religion may have evolved to provide the mechanism for bonding them into a coherent social unit.

Robin Dunbar is professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool, UK, and co-director of the British Academy's Centenary Research Project "Lucy to language: the archaeology of the social brain". His most recent book, The Human Story, is published by Faber and Faber

Thursday, February 19, 2009

The President of IHEU, Sonja Eggerickx, has sent greetings to the Libero Pensiero "Giordano Bruno" on the occasion of their annual commemortaion in the Campo de' Fiori, Rome on the occasion of the 409th anniversary of the murder of Giordano Bruno by the Catholic Church. The ceremony was attended this year by Hugo Estrella representing IHEU.

The text of the message follows:

Dear Friends

I bring greetings from the International Humanist and Ethical Union on this the occasion of the 409th anniversary of the murder in this square by the Catholic Church of Giordano Bruno for the crime of thinking for himself and for writing what he thought.

Today we are witnessing a resurgence of the obscurantism authoritarian ideology that dominated Europe for centuries, as the Church becomes once again more strident and aggressive in its interference in society.

But now the Christian Church is joined by an equally hostile threat to freedom in the name of militant Islam. And the future of Europe of European civilisation is once again being thrown into doubt.

We call upon Europe's freethinkers to unite under the banner of Giordano Bruno and to fight for a secular Europe free from religious domination.